At age 24 Piaget realised his lifelong work would be dedicated to answering this question: How does knowledge grow? He also thought that children’s minds were not less capable than adults, just different in that their thinking process reflected logic. It was his belief that most conventional school were too restrictive, as he understood that children learned spontaneously from their own needs and interests. He devised and conducted many different experiments to help demonstrate the differences in how children view and interact with the world compared to adults. He used these experiments to help demonstrate key behaviors that children show in each of his stages of development that are indicative of their level of cognitive development. Below are some of the key experiments for each stage.
Sensorimotor stage (until 2 years of age):
The first of piaget's stages of development defined by the child’s use of simple reflexes and gradually organizing and coordinating their sensations with their physical movements and actions. The child’s limitations of understanding outside of their immediate physical sensations is demonstrated through their lack of object permanence an example of an experiment showing this can be seen below: (Baillargeon, 1987)
Pre-operational Stage(From 2-7):
The second stage in Piaget’s theory of development is defined by the development of mental reasoning and ability to form concepts and use symbols. Unlike in the sensorimotor stage children in this stage can conceive of objects even when they are not present and can even use symbols to represent things from memory such as a simple drawing of a house:
The limitations of their reasoning at this stage revolve largely around their egocentric view of the world which Piaget demonstrated in his famous three mountains experiment which is shown here: (Gelman & Bailargeon, 1983)
Concrete Operational stage(7-13):
This is the last stage in a child’s development before reaching formal operational stage which is adulthood and ability to use complex abstract reasoning and understand concepts such as justice or morality, the concrete operational stage is demonstrated well in the following experiment in which a child can follow a given hypothetical reasoning through to its logical conclusion even if the hypothetical situation goes against what the child intuitively knows to be true. (Smedslund, 1964)
At age 24 Piaget realised his lifelong work would be dedicated to answering this question: How does knowledge grow?
He also thought that children’s minds were not less capable than adults, just different in that their thinking process reflected logic.
It was his belief that most conventional school were too restrictive, as he understood that children learned spontaneously from their own needs and interests. He devised and conducted many different experiments to help demonstrate the differences in how children view and interact with the world compared to adults. He used these experiments to help demonstrate key behaviors that children show in each of his stages of development that are indicative of their level of cognitive development. Below are some of the key experiments for each stage.
Sensorimotor stage (until 2 years of age):
The first of piaget's stages of development defined by the child’s use of simple reflexes and gradually organizing and coordinating their sensations with their physical movements and actions. The child’s limitations of understanding outside of their immediate physical sensations is demonstrated through their lack of object permanence an example of an experiment showing this can be seen below:(Baillargeon, 1987)
Pre-operational Stage(From 2-7):
The second stage in Piaget’s theory of development is defined by the development of mental reasoning and ability to form concepts and use symbols. Unlike in the sensorimotor stage children in this stage can conceive of objects even when they are not present and can even use symbols to represent things from memory such as a simple drawing of a house:The limitations of their reasoning at this stage revolve largely around their egocentric view of the world which Piaget demonstrated in his famous three mountains experiment which is shown here:
(Gelman & Bailargeon, 1983)
Concrete Operational stage(7-13):
This is the last stage in a child’s development before reaching formal operational stage which is adulthood and ability to use complex abstract reasoning and understand concepts such as justice or morality, the concrete operational stage is demonstrated well in the following experiment in which a child can follow a given hypothetical reasoning through to its logical conclusion even if the hypothetical situation goes against what the child intuitively knows to be true.(Smedslund, 1964)
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